Sometimes we need to let go of the world around us, our daily cares, issues that cause stress, and get away for a few days – relax, recollect, and come back ready to face the world with new resolve and vigor. This Summer my husband and I have been doing just that, in a series of short little trips. Last weekend, we went to the top of the world (well, it felt like it to us) to slip away for three beautifully brisk and sunny days in Zermatt. It was majestic, incredible, awe-inspiring, and magical. It was pure escapism as we explored the fantasy-like region around Zermatt and the Matterhorn, and all of our day to day cares floated with the clouds that sailed on past the mountaintops. No worries, no stresses, nothing but pure meditative existence, scenery, and a sense of childlike exploration. What more can one want in a holiday?
When my husband and I first started cooking gluten-free in our kitchen, we mainly focused on one type of meal — those that were naturally gluten-free.
The naturally gluten-free foods were the easiest to cook from scratch because they required no substitutions at all — risottos, fresh fruit, vegetables, custards & puddings, stir fry, roasted potatoes, homemade “chips”, salads, fresh steamed fish, bean stews, meringues, and even a macaron attempt or two. As a beginner to the gluten-free world nearly five years ago, I was thrilled with how many foods we could make without ever having to worry about an ingredient on a package label that could be harmful to my husband’s health. As long as we cooked from entirely fresh ingredients and avoided anything that came in a package or required flour, we were fine — and what a great variety we had to choose from!
But it didn’t take long before my husband would say, “You know, I really miss pizza,” or “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a thick creamy gravy to go on mashed potatoes sometime?” It was inevitable, really, that shunning all things flour-related was bound to cause waxing nostalgia for the meals we no longer ate. While it was great to get our feet wet by starting with the easy gluten-free meals that didn’t require any substitutions or extra thought, it seemed wrong to deprive ourselves completely of other foods that we enjoyed.
I set out on a mission of sorts to figure out how to convert our favorite foods to gluten free, where I found a veritable “Wild West” frontier land when it came to recipes — myriad flour blends and formulas either in packages on grocery store shelves or listed in books, none of which explained how they came to be or why they worked, often calling for expensive and elusive ingredients. It all seemed like some esoteric recipe voodoo.
I decided instead to create my own blends, first categorizing the various alternative flours and ingredients by texture and coarseness, and then quickly realizing that while those aspects do play a role in the end product, the key factor was in fact not the texture, but the starch, protein, and fat content, as these are the things that determine most how a flour will behave in a recipe. I can’t say I get a perfect product every single time on the first try, but the turning point in my success was when I started looking into exactly what I was replacing with my gluten-free flour blends.
Sometimes it really is the gluten that needs to be emulated, such as in a bread recipe, where the developed network of gluten in conventional breads actively works to trap the air pockets made by the yeast, allowing the bread to rise. Techniques for mimicking this include adding other leavening agents to help account for the fact that some of the air will indeed escape before the bread is done, or adding binding agents to help trap the air that is formed — and maybe even a combination of both of these techniques.
Often this is why one sees gluten-free recipes that include extra eggs, or gelling agents like ground flax or chia seeds, manufactured gums, or incorporation of starches into the GF blend, such as tapioca or arrowroot. Once we understand why these ingredients exist in a gluten-free recipe, we can better judge how to make substitutions to fit our needs – for example, don’t have ground chia seeds? Maybe adding an egg in its place will do the trick. The bread fell flat a bit and was too dense? We now have options. We consider the properties of the ingredients we are using, and this information can be used as tools for determining how to logically go about changing our recipes to improve them.
Other recipes that conventionally use flour don’t actually care about the gluten at all. Take, for example, a roux, essentially made up of a flour and a fat that are cooked together and then used as a thickening agent in soups and stews, such as gumbo. In the case of roux, there’s no elasticity needed, and no air to be trapped – all we are looking for is thickening, which occurs thanks to the starch components within wheat flour. This is great news for gluten-free cooks; there are lots of starchy gluten-free ingredients at our disposal that we can use to replace conventional wheat flour!
All-purpose wheat flour contains, along with gluten, a fair amount of starch. So to create a 1:1 substitution (by weight of course), one would just need to come up with a gluten-free flour blend that is also mostly (but not all) starch. This can be done either by using flours with similar starch content to wheat flour, or by supplementing the GF blend with a pure starch (cornstarch, tapioca, arrowroot, potato, glutinous rice flour, etc.). Each type of starch differs slightly in its chemistry, but for the most part they all have gelling and viscosity properties – i.e. they help food thicken and stick together. In something like our roux example, it’s not going to matter a whole lot what kind of starches we use, because the only aspect of the starch we are calling upon in this case is its thickening power.
Obviously, for baking, things get a little more complicated, but I’m convinced the overall strategy remains the same. The first thing I ask myself when converting a recipe is, “what in conventional wheat flour is doing the work? What traits do I need to make sure I replace with my gluten-free mix?” And then we can use our knowledge about the various gluten-free ingredients available to reproduce those properties. Actually, I think once one gets a bit more comfortable with gluten-free substitutions, there is even more freedom and more possibilities for “customizing” than when working with conventional all-purpose wheat flour. This is because one has the ability to pick and choose from amongst so many great ingredients — not just for certain properties, but also for flavors. For example, I often incorporate chestnut flour, because I just love the earthy rustic qualities it lends to baked goods.
Gluten-free substitutions don’t have to involve some mysterious wizardry in order to have success. Sometimes it’s just a bit of recipe tweaking, and other times, a little knowledge about the science behind why a recipe works goes a long way.
The Day of the Dead and Halloween are nearly upon us and I am frantically digging for recipes that can protect the living against the Un-dead. Books and papers fly as I paw through shelves and piles, seeking something to ward off the Zombies, Vampires and Werewolves that may be lurking outside the door, or that may invade my kitchen at any moment. They all have highly specialized dentition designed to make swift work of the main course – me!
I’m calling on restaurateurs — please, this time of the year, an amuse-bouche for the living might be just the thing to calm the customer’s nerves. Could chefs please get a little creative, and instead of offering me a puddle of olive oil, or herbed olive oil, or olives in a lake of olive oil with obligatory bread (that I don’t eat anyway), could they provide something that will protect our table from monsters? Let’s get our priorities straight please; safety comes first!
Incorporating fruit into your starters and main courses: an untraditional approach
Fruit deserves to have a place outside of dessert. Dessert is often shunned for fear of ingesting too many sugar-filled calories and a myriad other reasons, and sadly fruit is often under-appreciated, being associated only with a guilty, and even naughty, indulgence.
How often do we associate certain fruits solely with pies, tarts, scones, cakes and other sweet delights? Such a view not only limits our appreciation for fruit, but forces upon us a paradigm that fruit should be “improved upon” by making it even sweeter than it already is. Maybe for some acidic fruits, such as certain berries or citrus fruit, this is true, but many are already pleasurably sweet and unfortunately get overlooked as a valid component in other parts of a meal.
What if fruit were the star of other dishes too? Maybe a first course, served with meat, etc.? Some of my favorite dishes involve fruits, and it’s not just for the sweetness – many fruits pair really well with savory items and I think provide a balance to other strong elements. One of my most frequented pairings this summer has been to add herbs and the tang of locally-made goat cheeses to baked or roasted seasonal fruits. The markets are absolutely brimming with succulent produce, and every two weeks it becomes a “new” mad rush to enjoy as many ways as possible: first strawberries, then cherries, then apricots & peaches, and soon plums and other berries will arrive en masse.
And you know what? Sometimes I think the taste of fresh fruit is even more enjoyable when it is not a part of le dessert.
Review of Flo Makanai’s Les intolerances alimentaires: Cuisiner gourmand autrement (meaning literally, Food Intolerances: Epicurean Cooking with a Difference), published in French. Even though the book has not yet been published in English, we consider the information in this review helpful to an English-speaking audience.
When interviewed by Flo Makani, Nicolas Zamaria, with a Ph.D. in nutrition and director of a medical biology laboratory made a highly cogent point: “During the course of a life, 30 tons of food go through an individual’s digestive tube.” Imagine that before the era of synthetic pesticides that began in the 1930s (the word pesticide includes fungicides as well as weed and parasite killers], if there was to find a “Maginot” date, indicating an “after” and therefore a “before”, all of what that individual ingested, in other words, those 30 tons of food people ate before the 1930s, was organic. Yes, organic, without making any big deal about it! This was simply because farmers were not yet able to “rectify” nature’s big homeostatic equilibriums and therefore to endanger them. Today, rightfully, we are entitled — and in desperate need — to ask ourselves how that same digestive tube will treat the truly problematic situation, from a nutritional point of view, of the 30 tons of food it takes in these days. Because, of course, apart from the organic-labeled products (in France, 2.5% of the total cultivated area was devoted to organic farming in 2009), nothing else is organic anymore.
English adaptation in progress: The art of using up leftovers (or what can still be eaten)
La mise au point est faite par Nicolas Zamaria, directeur de laboratoire de biologie médicale, docteur ès nutrition, interrogé par Flo Makanai : « Au cours d’une vie, 30 tonnes d’aliments traversent le tube digestif d’un individu. » Imaginez vous qu’avant l’ère des pesticides de synthèse qui débute dans les années 1930 [le mot pesticide incluant insecticides, fongicides, herbicides et parasiticides], s’il fallait trouver une date Maginot désignant un « après » et donc un « avant », tout ce que cet individu ingérait, autrement dit ces 30 tonnes d’aliments, était bio. BIO ! Vous imaginez ! Tout simplement parce que l’homme cultivateur ne disposait pas encore des moyens de « rectifier » les grands équilibres homéostasiques de la nature ou, de les abîmer. Nous sommes légitimement en droit et devoir de nous interroger aujourd’hui sur la manière dont ce même tube digestif va traiter les 30 tonnes d’aliments tout à fait problématiques sur le plan nutritionnel qui lui seront proposés. Car, bien entendu, en dehors des produits étiquetés « bio » (2,5% de la surface agricole utile en France était consacrée en 2009 à l’agriculture biologique), plus rien n’est bio.
If you don’t happen to have a friend or family member who must avoid gluten, the term may sound like some weird fad – indeed it seems to be the hot new thing in pop culture. But while the term may be gaining popularity in today’s society, it is anything but a trendy diet.
When I first met my husband, we went to a local burger place for dinner as our first date. He ordered his burger without any bread, and I remember being intrigued by that choice – I hardly knew the guy at that point (it was our first date after all), but he didn’t seem the type to be into following a low-carb diet. So in my rather up-front and pointed way, I asked him why he did that, and he then went on to explain to me how he was unable to tolerate gluten. After we got married a few years ago, I took it upon myself as a personal challenge to make sure he could find tasty food to eat that fit within his dietary restrictions – and what a great and adventurous journey it has been!
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When interviewed by Flo Makani, Nicolas Zamaria, with a Ph.D. in nutrition and director of a medical biology laboratory made a highly cogent point: “During the course of a life, 30 tons of food go through an individual’s digestive tube.” Imagine that before the era of synthetic pesticides that began in the 1930s (the word pesticide includes fungicides as well as weed and parasite killers], if there was to find a “Maginot” date, indicating an “after” and therefore a “before”, all of what that individual ingested, in other words, those 30 tons of food people ate before the 1930s, was organic. Yes, organic, without making any big deal about it! This was simply because farmers were not yet able to “rectify” nature’s big homeostatic equilibriums and therefore to endanger them. Today, rightfully, we are entitled — and in desperate need — to ask ourselves how that same digestive tube will treat the truly problematic situation, from a nutritional point of view, of the 30 tons of food it takes in these days. Because, of course, apart from the organic-labeled products (in France, 2.5% of the total cultivated area was devoted to organic farming in 2009), nothing else is organic anymore.
